Announcing the Winner of the CREATIVE LIVE Editing contest

CHOICE – Aaron Green’s Winning Edit:

CONGRATULATIONS to Aaron Green (@AaronKGreen) for winning the edit contest from Creative Live! Aaron has won over $3,000 in gear from Redrock Micro.

For those of you who haven’t been following the events that led up to this, here’s a quick recap. A few months ago I went to Creative Live and taught two courses over a weekend – one on how to shoot a documentary style portrait piece, and the second a narrative scene. The goal was never really to put together a final edit – my focus was to make sure that the students in the classroom (that were being broadcast LIVE around the world to an internet audience) as well as the viewers learned as much as I could teach them in a day. Nonetheless there was a huge demand to see the final edit – so we decided to put up a contest to see who could do the best job of putting these pieces together.

100 submissions were submitted (that can be viewed here on Vimeo) and I have to admit that it was very challenging to select a winner. I was incredibly pleased to see as many entries as we did – and to see so many talented editors put in so much time, energy and creativity into these. It really was a pleasure to look through these and I think it spoke to just how important a part of the filmmaking process the editor is. The best part (I would assume) would be for you to see us during the actual shoot on the course – and see how everything came together, and eventually resulted in these edits.

It was a very very difficult decision – but I ultimately chose Aaron Green’s entry. The edit spoke directly to the power of editing in my opinion – Aaron did a fantastic job of restructuring the scene and emphasizing the best part of each performance. Keep in mind that we never really intended for this to become part of a final edit – our main emphasis during the Creative Live workshop was what was happening BEHIND the cameras, and making sure both the students attending learned something, as well as the thousands that were watching. I knew this – and in fact warned the actors that they would be getting very few takes, and that they were going to be somewhat neglected relative to a normal production. Given these factors – and the fact that many of the students on the crew had never shot as a group, or on a narrative piece – there were definitely some spots that needed to be edited around – and I think Aaron did this very gracefully, and managed to keep me completely engaged – even after having seen this footage time after time again!

I also selected two runners up. Congratulations to Lawrence Meriwether and Donald Strubler! Watch their "Choice" edits below.

W7’s Choice – Laforet Edit Contest by Lawrence Meriwether:

donaldStrubler [CHOICE] laforet | creativeLive edit:@donaldStrubler

Thank you again to all of you who participated in this contest!